The Book of V.

by Anna Solomon

  “You’re Lily,” says Vivian Barr.

  Lily nods.

  “You were very small when I knew you.”

  “Yes.”

  “My condolences. I loved your mother very much.”

  Then the woman is walking away, and Lily’s brothers are whispering before she has left the room about Vivian Barr’s many crimes: how she not only slept with their father, and did whatever she did to get kicked out of DC, and took their mother to the Jewish group that converted her, but was also the one who started Ruth smoking—she was the one, if you thought about it, who killed her. And not only that: their father blamed Vivian Barr for their mother losing the baby.

  “What baby?” Lily is pulled from watching the door Vivian Barr has disappeared through. She was thinking about how Vivian Barr must have learned about Ruth’s death in the obits—Ruth Rubenstein, born Rosemary Burnham, of Gloucester, Massachusetts—and how although there are others present today who knew Ruth as a young woman called Rosemary—including Lionel, Ian, and, just barely, Lily—no one else, to Lily’s knowledge, knew her as a girl.

  “You know about this,” Lionel says.

  “She might not,” Ian says.

  Does she?

  “She was pregnant with a fourth,” Ian says. “Like second-trimester pregnant.”

  “My god.”

  “I swear we’ve talked about this,” Lionel says.

  Lily searches her memory. Is it possible—it does not seem possible—that she knew this and somehow forgot? Ruth never told her, she’s certain of that. Maybe she wanted to protect Lily, her one child bearer. But after she’d had Rosie and June? Why not then? Lily reaches for a glass of wine off a passing tray and gulps as she thinks back. She throws her mind at her childhood like a net. What she catches, though, is not her mother—it’s Vivian Barr. Lily is certain. The villainess herself. Her hair is redder. She is standing in the kitchen in a robe. Lily’s father is there but Lily’s father is not what Lily sees; Lily’s father is there in her memory only as a presence, as he was always there, even after he left. She sees only Vivian Barr, in her robe. Lily is outside, cold, looking in, the scene soundless. The scene is only a moment, held in the sliding glass door: Vivian Barr barefoot, though it is not summer, her belted waist pressing into the counter, her hair giving a little shiver, her hand placing a piece of apple into her mouth.

  SUSA

  THE QUEEN

  Her Earlier Reentry

  Once more, it’s as you imagine. The exodus begins in the middle of the night. A heavy dark, the air sweet with the shybrush that grows along the creek.

  So there must be a breeze. It might be strong enough to lift the cloth that covers her hair. She might faint. The air, the cloth, her skin, all of it fluttering, touching, touched.

  She works to concentrate, to attend to what is happening: I am out, I am here, I must find the camp and take them far away by sunrise. She is dead, according to the public record. And she has to stay dead, to make her exodus before she is found alive. If she’s found alive, she will be truly dead.

  She looks to Baraz. Behind him, like another country, the palace looms, still innocent of their flight. Ahead, she sees a herd of broad, humped animals, and a vertigo rises through her. Where is she? What has happened to the outside world? Then Baraz nods and begins to walk, and she sees: the animals are the tents. The camp is ahead.

  Yet as they walk, the tents appear to shift and sigh, to behave as the animals she first saw. This will happen often in her first days out: she will see a vision of a thing before the thing itself, and the vision will be hard to shake. A towering flame before a distant tree. A silver belt girdling the sand before a creek. She will recover; she will orient to the disorientation. For now she is in shock. Her eyes twitch at the vastness, strain to go everywhere. It’s a physical effort to make them focus and look for what she’s supposed to be looking for: the tent Esther described to her, with its asymmetrical roof, the odd angle to the back wall, the beautiful, bright fabric hung as a door—

  You thought she was Esther?

  You wanted her to be Esther.

  Oh. But that’s not possible. The queen and her child—soon to be children—can’t leave the palace. Only in a fantasy, a farce, could they be allowed another fate: return heroic, save the people, destroy the villain, etc. Happy coincidence, vengeance, reversal, rejoicing. There will be a story like that, but this isn’t the one.

  She is Vashti. Thirty paces from the camp, Baraz stops, slips off his sandals, then kneels to remove hers. He hooks the straps onto one of his thick forefingers, lowers himself into a crouch, and begins to slide so silently toward the camp that if Vashti were to close her eyes she would not know he is there. She closes her eyes. She is overwhelmed again by the space around her, the sky, the air prickling her skin. You can’t know when you’re kept from night and day and fresh air for so long that when you finally get it, what you’ve been craving, it will be terrifying, almost painful. She can’t hear Baraz. She startles. But there he is, looking back for her. And here she is, beginning again to follow him, to try to mimic his crablike dance. Do this, she tells herself. Only this. Tomorrow, or maybe by now it’s today, later, there will be time … But she is distracted. A new sensation. It would not shock another—Esther, for instance. It’s only sand, scraping the sides and bottoms of her feet. But not once in her twenty-eight years—it’s easy to forget how young she is, this former queen—has Vashti walked barefoot, and the agitation brings her back to the baths of her youth. Eucalyptus branches, lashing and scratching. By the end of the old women’s beating she would be pink and tingling and raw, and yet always, she wanted more. The Babylonian baths were training, in this way, for the erotic. But Ahasuerus did away with them anyway, just as he did away with any other of her people’s customs that he could in his opinion easily replace with his own. Vashti was enraged at first. Who was he, a former steward, to make the rules? Later, after she grew inexplicably tender toward him, she forgave him. He was not a natural king, like her father and grandfather, with a face that never gave way. He was suggestible, and very short, and worshipped her so fully that she not infrequently saw a bit of drool fall from his mouth as she disrobed. She had the power, and he knew it, and so she let him choose his trappings the way he wanted them. But the baths she never stopped missing. The harshness against her skin now as she slides after Baraz.

  Just slide, she tells herself. Focus. She has had nearly three years in a hole in the earth. You might think by now she would have used up all her thoughts, traveled to every splinter of her past ten million times. But you would not be accounting for madness. Early on, when she was first trapped, it was true that she thought nonstop. Her thoughts made a frantic loop of regret and fury as she flailed and scratched at the walls: should have done what he wanted; should have spit in his face; should have killed herself; should have turned the guards on Ahasuerus; should have done what he wanted … She knocked her head against her walls. Her thoughts would have destroyed her if she had not shut them down. She shut them down. Went numb. So what is happening now as she follows Baraz across the sand is not just shock but a coming alive, a rebirth that is not entirely within her control, and her mind as if to make up for its time of hibernation begins to move as fast as a splitting star. Her feet trying to mimic Baraz’s remind her of her father criticizing her flat arches, which did not belong, he said, with her narrow heels and long toes; they were the arches of a peasant, they exposed something base in her; and the timbre of her father’s voice calls to mind his death, midspeech, on his throne, when an improperly affixed candelabrum fell from the ceiling above him, splitting open his skull. How many ways she felt then, at fifteen, horrified and in awe and curious, so curious to see the contents of her father’s head … but then she was swept up by her king’s chief minister and pushed toward Ahasuerus, who was standing, as always, at the ready. Her father would have murdered this minister if he’d seen what the gesture was allowed to grow into, but Ahasuerus was teach
able, at least, he was malleable. Vashti did not mind that, she thinks as she slides, remembering the first time they made the spring journey from Susa to Persepolis, how readily Ahasuerus tossed his chin away when they passed the Saka camps along the way, though his own family had been nomads not so many hundreds of years ago, and Baraz’s back now, in front of her, the broad animal bulk of it, is so precisely the shadow to Ahasuerus’s slight one that she is reminded of yet another reason she could not do as he asked: not because she had drunk less wine—she had drunk plenty—but because she was and had always been a queen and he was and had always been a steward in a king’s robes. So she understood, when she was asked to appear before him and his men in only her crown, that he would regret it. She also understood that this did not mean that he did not think he wanted it. For a short while she had worked to decide which was more important, what he thought he wanted now or what he would want later, until she realized, or was it that she remembered, that she did not have a choice; she could not do it; she had been trained from birth to be a queen, the same training that makes it a struggle for her to squat now and copy Baraz’s crab walk, for she was raised up with sticks and strings, like a wall plant, taught to walk with her clavicle to the sky and to keep her robes closed except in the baths, and except for her husband, and she had done all of this, and she had opened them for him, too; she had gotten over what would have been her father’s disapproval and let him please her, and she had pleased him; he knew what he’d been given, so much so that even when she could not bear him a child he kept her and refused the children of his other wives as his heirs, and refused the shock in the court, and refused to believe it would not happen with her eventually, that her body that had been swaddled and shrouded and shod and finally crowned could possibly be a body that failed, and though she felt certain he was wrong she was grateful for his faith. So there was a certain rightness between them, until that night.

  But now Baraz is slowing and pointing. Now Vashti is scanning for the tent with the bright, beautiful flaps; she is prodding herself, Stop thinking of that night, pay attention to this one, you are supposed to be dead, you will be dead, but this warning only reminds her of the second choice she had to make that night—would she play dead or would she run?—which just like the first choice quickly revealed itself not to be a choice at all because a queen could not run and so she said she was sick, too sick to stand, and as soon as the words left her mouth it was not untrue, there was the wine, after all, and his cracked demand, and the party all around her, swaying, and a necklace she wore that was heavier than her crown, which she also wore, so that she began to tip backward, and once she was down she could not get up. But now—

  She sees it! The tent is as Esther said it would be, the door’s fabric bright enough that it conquers the dark, so bright it seems to make sparks fly, and Vashti looks up, straight at the sky and its staggering sweep of light, and thinks, I am doing both now, I am playing dead and running, and she starts to laugh, and Baraz muzzles her, and then they wait until the noise has settled back into her bones before they pull open the tent’s flap.

  MANHATTAN

  LILY

  Out of Eden into History

  After the memorial service, an emptiness opens up in Lily. It comes without words; it is sensation only, a physical presence distended with absence. When she wakes it is waiting for her, nestled in crevices like a dark moss, and it crouches there, almost politely, until she gets through lunches and shoes and hugs and sees the people out the door. But once she stops moving, to drink her tea or sit on the toilet or stand in the shower, the emptiness unfurls like a great, pungent fern, an elegant slayer of anything that is not it.

  Adam tells her it will be okay. He tells her not to rush whatever she has to go through; he’s here for her; what can he do for her? He says all the right things and even does a lot of the right things, like calling the preschool and saying they’d like one more month of three full days a week, and calling the sitter and asking her to cover the other two days. This even though she has seen him madly tallying on scrap paper while reading through their bank statement, and hears him working late each night, once talking with a colleague about the need to employ teenage girls at the camp’s developing fish farm so as to reduce violence against them in their tents. Lily’s need feels pathetic in comparison to these other needs, and this feeling, combined with the fern, drops her into a low-grade paranoia. When he says, What can I do for you? is he following some kind of manual? When he finds her in a listless moment and hugs her tightly, is he hugging her only because he fears what she will do if he doesn’t?

  On day four, she manages to sit at the computer and read the news. It is good to be made to think of the world, even if the world consists of crap. The goodness lasts for a couple minutes, then she opens up the online White Pages and types in Vivian Barr. Her brothers have built the woman up to such a degree—the exiled wife, the smoking seductress—that Lily has come to think of her as not only estranged from Ruth but in hiding, more generally, from the world. Yet here is her address and phone number, publicly displayed. When after four rings Vivian Barr answers, she does not seem surprised to hear from Lily, nor does she force Lily to stumble toward some kind of ask. “You’ll come for tea,” she says, and they make a date, for Friday. It is Wednesday. Lily goes back to bed.

  The next day, day five, she tells their sitter not to come; she’s going to spend the day with June. She thinks this will help fend off the fern but she is wrong. The day passes in a soup—they lie down together twice, but June never falls asleep, only Lily, who each time she wakes has an instant of forgetting her grief. Then she remembers. At two, in the shower, she is so overcome, nearly paralyzed, by the pore-opening steam that by the time she gets out, June has liberated an entire box of tampons from their wrappers. At six they go to pick up Rosie from theater and Hal, who has already said how sorry he is about Ruth, says it again, and does Lily want to come for chili? Jace made some last night. He is solid, standing there, his voice a cup of comfort. And Lily goes, because Adam has a late meeting and won’t be home until nine and at home there are only noodles to eat and the empty soup to stand around in until the girls somehow go to sleep. Hal and Jace’s place is close, on Seventh Street, a garden-/parlor-floor arrangement in a building they seem to own. But Jace is not there, only the chili. Jace has a late meeting, too. So after the chili has been eaten and the children dispatched somewhere downstairs to watch a show, Lily finds herself standing in Jace’s kitchen with Hal, who has handed her a can of beer. The beer is cold. A long silence passes between them. Hal leans against the sink in his canvas pants and T-shirt while Lily stares into a middle distance so as not to look at the photos on the fridge. She tries to think. She gets as far as, Oh please, I am not going to be that woman; it’s too predictable, too depressing in its predictability; hello midlife, hello grief, hello lust, hello there was not supposed to be this kind of wanting on the heels of death … but now a line is being drawn in her ear. A finger is following the curve there, slipping down the side of her neck, curling forward into the hollow, where it rests, on her pulse. Her hand stays on the beer, her other in her jeans pocket, but she waits for his mouth, opens to it, feels a silent, trembling wail fill her throat, falls in. Their kissing is a kind of kissing she once did with some regularity, sloppy and urgent and wet, a kind of dredging each other with their tongues and teeth. His hand is under her shirt. Her breast is out of her bra. Her hand is out of her pocket, feeling for him. And it keeps going like this, like they are teenagers in a field, pushing and pressing and pawing but with minimal contact so that the contact, where it is made, sears and enflames. There is no looking, it’s always dark in the field, there is only touching, and there is no noise, there are children nearby, and then it’s done, because the children are done, and clomping up the stairs, begging for dessert.

  * * *

  5B, the doorman tells her the next day. Then, This way. Then, Ma’am? Lily nods, and moves toward the elevator. She
knows she wants to be here. She has made a great effort to be here. But the emptiness is bad today. It climbs into her sternum. It says, Retreat. Slump back down Vivian Barr’s Upper West Side block with its cabbagelike plants blooming between the trees and their little fences. Get back on the train. Go back to bed.

  Still, she pushes the buttons. She rises.

  “Welcome.”

  To Lily’s right, Vivian Barr stands in an open doorway, wearing a belted dress and a pair of orange-velvet pumps, and Lily feels immediate regret at her own choices: a wool skirt and cowl-neck sweater, both nice, but still. One of her friends calls cowl-necks “the new aging woman’s cardigan,” and here Lily is wearing one to visit a woman decades her senior who is pulling off a V-neck dress and heels.

  “Come, Georgie,” says Vivian Barr, and for a moment Lily worries she is confused. Then a small dog trots out and begins to sniff at Lily’s boots. “Shall we let her in?” Vivian Barr asks.

  And the dog, though it seems impossible, nods.

  The apartment is stately, as Lily expected, but not large. High ceilings, substantial moldings. A living room into which they do not go, a hall lined with art, a galley kitchen connected by an archway to a dining room painted in a dark hue that some decorator in Brooklyn would probably call tarnished pewter. Here it does not seem false, though. A mahogany table is set with two woven placemats, each laid with a dessert plate, saucer, and tea cup. A massive plant fills the window, catching what little light reaches a midfloor apartment at noon. Lily understands that it’s a lovely scene, one that in another era of her life would make her feel serene, but in this era, today, she wishes Vivian Barr would turn on the chandelier. She wishes there were lunch instead of tea, music instead of silence. Vivian Barr has gone into the kitchen, where a kettle is boiling, leaving Lily to arrange herself awkwardly in the arch, neither in nor out of the space. She watches as the older woman attends to various tasks, moving with striking efficacy. She dons an apron, seizes tongs from a drawer, shuts the drawer, opens her oven. She is reaching for the lowest rack when she teeters and begins to tip forward.